Orinduik is home to a diamond mining community and we're joined by an Amerindian man, the father of a bemused boy we have befriended.
The tour guide tells us that the rainbow appears every day; that the Falls were discovered in the nineteenth-century by a British explorer; and that according to Amerindian legend, they were named after a tribal chief who canoed over them in an act of self-sacrifice.
One is Bolivia, where next month Evo Morales, an autocratic socialist of Amerindian descent, will cruise to a third term because of his popular redistributionist policies and his grip on the media.
Like this, from Brad DeLong:Why do we think that for most of the period from 12000 BC to 1492, most of the Amerindian population was, by our standards, quite poor?
A year earlier Mr Morales, a socialist coca-growers' leader of Amerindian descent, had won Bolivia's presidency proclaiming that he was "the United States's worst nightmare".
IN A hut in an Amerindian village, nine hours' drive from Georgetown, Guyana's capital, a young schoolteacher is modelling fish and other animals from ballato, a form of solid rubber gathered from sap.
Both produced mild versions of some charges now laid against Allende: for instance (1973), of Cubans training his personal guard, or guerrillas "tolerated" by the government, (though the actual ones our reporter met were a fairly hopeless, partly Amerindian group, more like Mexico's Zapatists than the strike force of revolution).
THE Amerindian peoples of Canada, where they are known as First Nations, like those in Bolivia (see article), have traditionally held land in common.
Guyana's indigenous Amerindian population has grown; it is now nearly a tenth of the total.
Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they displaced.
The constitution says that before exploiting any resource on Amerindian lands, the government must consult the inhabitants.
